AI support for jurors stopped being a thought experiment on 8 September, when a serving circuit judge told a House of Lords committee that the NHS self-help tools should be repurposed for the twelve people in the jury box. Judge Kaly Kaul KC gave evidence for the judicial branch of the GMB union, in the second session of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee inquiry into support for jurors, drawing on 43 years in crime and ten years teaching for the Judicial College.
The model put to the peers is small and concrete. Every juror already receives a number from the court, and that number would open a secure page holding an assistant. We should repurpose the NHS self-help AI tools for juries, the judge said, make it secure and have a juror page which they can enter using the juror number. The assistant would explain what jury service involves at the start, and after the trial it would become the first door to further help, with a telephone line and counselling behind it. The cost, the committee heard, would not be much.
A machine placed in front of a juror during a live trial sits one question away from an offence.
Where the offence sits
Read it as welfare and the proposal is sensible. Read it as software and a problem appears at once. A machine placed in front of a juror during a live trial sits one question away from an offence. Section 20A of the Juries Act 1974 makes it a crime for a juror to research the case during the trial period, and section 20D makes it a crime to disclose what was said in the deliberations. An assistant built to be open and welcoming is built to answer. A juror who types a question about the charge, or about what someone said in the retiring room, has crossed a line the software invited them towards, with the exchange recorded.
The same session went further in the other direction. The judge backed a therapeutic and research exemption to the secrecy rule, so that accredited counsellors and academics studying juries can hear what happened in deliberations, with permission sought case by case. Put the two proposals side by side and the direction of travel is towards a controlled channel out of the jury room. Parliament will settle that, not your firm, and it deserves watching, because what the channel carries becomes part of the record of a trial.
What this asks of your practice
If you defend or prosecute in the Crown Court, the practical point arrives long before anything is built. Jurors carry phones today, and a free assistant answers the questions the proposed page would refuse. The standard warning about not researching the case was written for search engines and for social media. A juror who asks a chatbot to explain joint enterprise in plain words does not file that under research. Raise the point with the bench when the court is settling what the jury is told at the outset, and ask for the direction to name assistants by what they do rather than by their brand.
Then give yourself a habit for when something does go wrong. A juror irregularity involving a machine leaves a fuller trace than a conversation in a corridor, because the questions and the answers exist in writing somewhere. Ask for what was logged, and ask early, since retention periods are short and the operator has no reason to keep anything once an account closes. There is a quieter lesson in the evidence for the firm itself. When the cheapest first line of support inside the justice system is assumed to be a machine, the same assumption is arriving at your own front door.
The exchange is set out in the committee's uncorrected transcript of the session of 8 September 2026, which is open to anyone and carries the usual warning that neither the witness nor the members have yet approved the wording.
If you want the questions your advocates should be asking about machines inside the trial process set down on a single page, start with a conversation.